The Loss of Leon Meed

Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by The Friday Project 2015

First published in the USA by Scribner in 2005

Copyright © Josh Emmons 2005

Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Josh Emmons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007592906

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007592913

Version: 2015-03-05

Praise for The Loss of Leon Meed:

‘Here’s how you know Josh Emmons is the real deal: he’s created a full spectrum of Californian characters who are ludicrous and ill-behaved and lovable in equal measure; he’s a major-league prose writer who has fun in every sentence without ever showing off or hitting a phony note; and you want to keep reading him for the pure pleasure of his company’

JONATHAN FRANZEN

‘Emmons writes with crisp, gratifying authority. The Loss of Leon Meed has considerable appeal … and succeeds in finding comic potential in unlikely places’

New York Times

‘Emmons cycles through and illuminates the plights of his diverse, crowded cast – including a recovering alcoholic, an overweight therapist and a Korean hippie – with a finesse that approaches that of a seasoned literary ventriloquist. The characters’ stories take on a cumulative, mesmerizing rhythm’

New York Times Book Review

‘An audaciously ambitious first novel … The Loss of Leon Meed is a canny status report on the American soul … engaging, enigmatic’

Los Angeles Times

‘A mystical ensemble fable about chance and fate and the importance of not giving up … Emmons has sizable talent [and] a real shape-shifter’s gift for imagining his way into lives different from, and especially older than, his own … There’s wonderful stuff here, little stylistic pleats, serifs and tailfins that root in the mind and just won’t budge. Its central enigma rewards speculation’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘As remarkable and moving a portrait of America as I have seen in some time’

GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Super Sad True Love Story

Dedication

For my parents

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part II

January 15

Part III

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Josh Emmons

About the Publisher

1

Once, if you had driven north on Highway 101 from San Francisco past its outlying bedroom communities and vineyards and hippie enclaves, beyond blighted motels and one-pump gas station towns, over a road at times so winding and mountain-clinging that a moment’s distraction could steer you off a cliff and into freefall, you would have reached Eureka, the coastal seat of Humboldt County in northern California. It was a city whose forty thousand inhabitants faced the Pacific Ocean on one side and all of America on the other. It sat between the deeps.

You might then have forgotten about it if you were continuing on to the cities of consequence, to Portland or Seattle. Or to the windswept streets and unspoiled air of Canada. Or to the North Pole. You might have been scaling the planet and in no mood for its way stations.

But if you had stayed in Eureka, you would have discovered a weathered city with an almost granular fog and a high cloud cover, with temperatures rarely dipping below forty-five or climbing above seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, where tourists wondered how they’d slipped out of the California Dream. You would have wondered this, too, if you had compared the steely sky and faded architecture of Eureka with the sun and oceanfront villas of that dream. You would have thought that something was wrong.

The thing about dreams, though, is that they’re products of the imagination, and the imagination, like all engines of terror and transcendence, can do anything.

On an afternoon in late November, the last of the school buses pulled away and fourth-grade teacher Elaine Perry realized that she hadn’t asked any of her students to clean the chalkboard erasers. She stood by the tetherball pole and kicked a wood chip that sliced cleanly through the air and came to rest on the edge of the playing field where earlier that day a third grader had broken his leg. Children led dangerous, thrill-seeking lives. Spidering over jungle gyms, roof climbing, bike racing, contact sports. They chose the reckless and perilous, gravitated toward jeopardy and disaster. Adulthood is all about repressing that instinct, Elaine thought as she stared at Muir Elementary School’s main building, and learning to desire the predictable and unthreatening. Principal Giaccone’s office window was open. She hated cleaning the erasers and had been pleasantly surprised to learn when she began teaching in September that her students loved it. Giaccone had stopped by her classroom on the first day of school with a waxy red apple. “The forbidden fruit,” he’d said, presenting it to her. “Only if it’s from a certain tree in Eden,” she’d said, holding it up and reading its small white sticker: “This one comes from Washington.” Giaccone smiled and said he hoped her students appreciated what a clever teacher they were getting, that his own fourth-grade teacher, Miss Costigan, in addition to being the only centenarian in his hometown, had been a yearlong lesson in crotchetiness. Elaine caught the emphasis he gave to crotch and thought, These silly flirtations. I can’t have an administrative fling. They go so badly. I could lose my job. He could lose his. Not to mention our respective families, my kids and hus— “Call me if you need anything,” Giaccone said. “There should be a bullhorn in the supply closet.”

Elaine, wife and mother of two, from the town of Red Bluff seventy miles away, graduate of Humboldt State University, hair straightener, I Ching dabbler, and mystery novel consumer, did her job very well. In addition to teaching twenty-three fourth graders, she supervised the chess club, directed the school production of South Pacific, and ran the Gifted & Talented program. Her husband, Greg, was having an affair with a nurse named Marlene who worked at the hospital where he was an orthopedist. Elaine sometimes left her car beside the grove of old-growth redwoods that bordered the Muir Elementary parking lot and walked home past ranch-style houses painted the primary colors—red, blue, yellow—in rigid, unbroken order. She sang “A Cock-Eyed Optimist” and tried to mean it. In July her father had been discovered to have a meningioma, a tumor growing out of the thin membrane covering his brain called the meninx, for which he underwent an unsuccessful surgery and was currently in radiation therapy and taking a battery of antiseizure medications that often made him forget what he was doing. When Muir experienced budgetary cutbacks—“those pricks in Sacramento,” Giaccone had fumed in a moment of faculty meeting impropriety—Elaine learned that there might be layoffs of the last-hired-first-fired variety. Her husband grew lazy in his excuses for arriving home past midnight— “Honey, Steve might need me for an assist on a motorcycle wreck that just came in, some kid whose femur is sticking out of his kneecap. Don’t wait up. Love you”—which gave her the opportunity to singlehandedly feed, wash, encourage, and console their two children through their five- and nine-year-old growing pains. She ordered an awesome nine-inch dildo from a mail order company in San Francisco called Good Vibrations. South Pacific was a disaster. Two children, siblings who played the French murderer and Bloody Mary with amazing vivacity, were yanked out of school midway through rehearsals by their mother, then seeking a divorce from their father, and the rest of the cast seemed hopelessly far away from memorizing their lines—much less developing the wherewithal to sing in public—in time for the mid-December opening night. She found blood in her stool and was told by a gynecologist that she had an iron deficiency and needed to rest more during menstruation. But she never slept beyond four hours a night these days, reading macabre tales of murder and insurance fraud until her husband came home, at which time she’d feign sleep until his loathsome, sexually sated snore started up, and then she’d rise, fix herself a bologna sandwich, and resume reading in the TV den.

As she was clapping erasers outside, Principal Giaccone poked his head through the window and called down to her, “Elaine! Oh, Miss Perry! Could I see you for a minute?” And she entered the building and climbed the stairs to the first floor and knocked formally on his door and sat in front of him and listened to his spiel about financial constraints and the necessity of letting some top quality people go, and how he’d hate to have to do that to her, but how he might have to unless, well, unless they came to an agreement. Giaccone stared at a blank computer in front of him. Things have been building toward this, he said, concentrating on the empty screen and then turning to smile complicitly at her. His secretary had gone home and there was nobody else who could hear this stab at sexual coercion. This grossest form of blackmail.

“Are you saying,” began Elaine, sliding her gaze from Giaccone to a picture of him in a lineup shaking the governor’s hand, “that the only way I can keep my job is if I fuck you?”

Giaccone exhaled loudly—he’d been holding his breath—“God no,” he lied. “What gave you that? It’s just there are these extenuating circumstances, and certain difficult decisions have to be made—”

But Elaine was already standing up and straightening her skirt before reaching for the zipper along the side. “If that’s all it takes,” she said, pulling down her underwear.

Giaccone got up and stepped forward as though to intervene or help. “Don’t be that way,” he said. “I just thought you and I had this thing.”

Elaine unbuttoned her blouse and untucked Giaccone’s shirt. “We do. Lift up your arms.”

“Look, you’re doing this out of anger or something. There’s nothing erotic about this.”

“Of course there is. This is exactly how it works. Step out of your boxers. And take off your watch. Men should never wear a watch when they have sex. It’s too tempting for women to look at.” Elaine grabbed a tissue from the desk and used it to pull out her tampon, which she dropped in the wastebasket.

“Come on,” said Giaccone, staring with embarrassment at the wastebasket. “I didn’t know.”

“Now you do. Is this how you normally respond to naked women?” Elaine had Giaccone’s flaccid penis in her hand. Massaging it just below its head and then, as it grew and stiffened, stroking it up and down.

“Oh, yeah,” said Giaccone, coughing the words.

“Yeah. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

When Giaccone reached out to hold Elaine’s waist she caught his hand and pushed him back onto the desk, and as he got bigger she climbed up and sat on him and enfolded him.

“Oh, Jesus!” Giaccone cried out, stretching his hands over his head, pushing documents and the phone off the desk, writhing like a merman caught in a fishing net.

“You can’t bring him into it,” Elaine murmured. “He’s got nothing to do with it.”

When it was over she dressed while he lay staring at the ceiling.

“That was—” he said. “You hate me, don’t you?”

Elaine opened the door and said, “I don’t hate anybody,” closing it behind her. Down the hall she passed a wan twenty-something boy with thin blue hair wearing headphones and pushing a mop over scarred linoleum. He smiled at her and she smiled back, unable to gauge the innocence of the transaction, unable to gauge the innocence of anything. Outside, music was playing and she began to sing loudly, “I hear the human race/ Is falling on its face/ And hasn’t very far to go,/ But ev’ry whippoorwill/ Is selling me a bill/ And telling me it just ain’t so!”

“It just ain’t so,” she repeated to the trees and the cars and the houses and herself. “It could be awful and degrading and it could be a conspiracy of evil, but … but …” She let her voice fade to nothing and walked along as though carried by the wind, and when she remembered to look up through the breaks in the canopy of trees, the sky was a bright canary yellow.

Ten days later, at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Street, where Highway 101 hit the middle of its Eureka crawl, the night lights went off at the Pantry. It was seven thirty in the morning, and Silas Carlton had been drinking coffee and eating a Hungry Man Special for half an hour. He’d bought a Eureka Times-Standard on his way to the diner and read about the timber industry’s response to recent environmental activism. Both the article and the response were badly constructed; key elements of each contained errors.

Silas raised his coffee cup in salute to Teri as she walked by with orange-and-black-lidded coffeepots. He forgot which color meant decaffeinated and which meant regular, a distinction he’d known all his life. Like the names of friends and relatives that now escaped his immediate recall. Once familiar objects that had become strange. Orange meant something.

“Silas,” said Teri, pausing in her white sneakers and shadowy stockings, “I do declare I’ve never seen you ask for a third cup.”

“So you’ve turned into Scarlett O’Hara?” he said.

Teri smiled and refilled his cup and returned to the kitchen. The Times-Standard weighed in at twenty-four pages—depressingly small for the county’s largest newspaper. Silas read an article congratulating four county natives for running the Boston Marathon, although none had placed even in the top one thousand; an editorial explaining why the paper would discontinue its Public Safety Log, listing significant arrests (no longer had the space); and an Associated Press article about America’s zany love of meatless hot dogs. He skimmed local sports stories that had larger headlines than bodies, wedding announcements and syndicated comic strips and a company-profile “Who’s Who.”

He read more carefully when he got to the obituaries. These he appreciated. These were a chance for Silas, age seventy-five, to see what others were dying of and how and when and where. The details of death were increasingly interesting to him, and not just because it was less “later when I’m old” and more “any day now,” but because they seemed to come in two extreme varieties: the mundane and the horrific. Either “peacefully asleep in the arms of her husband of sixty years” or “shot in the head by a carjacker at the corner of H Street and Buhne,” provoking a “she was a fine lady” or “what the hell is wrong with this world?” Silas wondered how frequently there was a correlation between one’s death and one’s life, whether the old woman’s peaceful stroke ended a life of bone-deep righteousness or fantastic dissipation. And the carjack victim: choir boy or Hell’s Angel? Did karma play any part in our end? Was poetic justice mere poetry?

Silas’s life hadn’t been exemplary by certain standards, yet neither had it been unforgivable. There were things of which he was proud: raising his former wife’s diabetic son when she died and the boy’s father looked to be a slipshod guardian; refusing Shell Oil’s filthy lucre in exchange for his approval of their offshore oil drilling plan near Samoa; walking two miles in the middle of the night to a suicidal friend’s house and convincing her that depression, like happiness, was only temporary. As there was behavior of which he was ashamed: sleeping with his best friends’ wives (three best friends, five wives); knocking out a guy’s front teeth over a disputed game of pool; lying (to everyone, all the time, with and without reason). Silas wondered how, if at all, these things would affect his death.

He was a retired bike shop owner and former city councilman and often lonely. His outspoken criticisms of Eureka’s budgetary priorities and the state of America’s forests, which for many years had identified him in the community as someone who thought about big issues, now made him a curmudgeon.

He was tall and skinny and had bad posture from years of hunching over desks and trying not to be conspicuous around shorter people. Thick white hair shocked out of his head like a woodpecker’s, giving his bony features an avian quality. He wore sturdy black-framed glasses and black turtleneck sweaters like some funky old beatnik Rip Van Winkling in the twenty-first century doing his best Samuel Beckett impression and staring down the combined forces of illness, fatigue, and moral collapse. Yet nobody noticed him these days as he walked around Old Town and sat in coffee shops and listened and tried to eke out a meaning to his days. He blended into the background as someone you’d seen a thousand times but could never place from where. The social life now open to him centered on his niece Rebecca’s family—he’d once been close to his great-nieces Lillith and Maria—and chance encounters with people old enough to remember him. Very few occasions for him to forget names, altogether too few.

His death would make these people sad, and the other obituary readers out there would take note of it—perhaps like him they would speculate on its justice—and it would bring his family together for a day or two of discussing him fondly and resolving that life goes on. Silas’s sound and fury would be like the other sounds and furies that had signified nothing. He would disappear.

He looked across the diner at two mustachioed truck drivers—noted the grossly obtruding bellies over scrawny legs and the padded nylon vests and the feet that knew how to maintain 65 mph for several uninterrupted weeks—who hit each other lightly on the shoulder with the backs of their hands to emphasize a point or command a laugh-along. Touching someone makes them your friend. Silas recognized one of the men and miraculously remembered his name, Shannon Koslowski, whose father, Pete, had led the move to price-fix dairy products in the area thirty years earlier. Pete died two weeks ago. Aneurysm. Making an omelet.

Glancing down at the paper, Silas noticed a small box beneath the obituaries that said “MISSING: Leon Meed, of 427 Neeland Dr. Last seen on December 1. Age 54, medium height, curly brown hair. Any information, please call 555/2471.”

I’d rather go missing than die, Silas thought to himself. When you’re missing you still have a chance.

Later that morning at McDonald’s, Silas’s great-niece Lillith Fielding stood in front of an enormous griddle range with her manager, Ron. Heightened-senses Ron who saw everything and forbade—he was honor-bound not to allow—sloppiness and unprofessionalism. She sniffled and he wordlessly, reproachfully gave her a tissue. Her starched uniform rubbed against her armpits—the blisters were a matter of time and patience—and her face was breaking out despite her abstinence from eating at work. As though mere proximity to grease could ruin one’s complexion. She’d been on shift for five hours with only a single fifteen-minute break spent alone because no one else was on her schedule. In the women’s bathroom she’d filed her nails and written a limerick about the weediness of Ron, brushed her shoulder-length brown hair and separated it into two pigtails, and translated the amount of her first paycheck into Wiccan supplies it would buy. Then the break was over.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” Ron asked, not looking at her, having eyes only for the range, where three small beef patties curled up slightly around their edges. It was hot in the cooking area and the milkshake machine behind them ground its way through a hundred pounds of frozen soybean crystals and strawberry extract in a successful cold fusion. Everything was equally delicious and nauseating.

“I don’t know,” said Lillith.

“You don’t.”

“No.”

“And you’ve had how many training days so far?”

“Four. But I wasn’t hired as a cook. I’m supposed to take drive-thru orders and then start at the cash register. Ambrose said those were going to be my only two shifts.”

“Ambrose is the assistant manager. I’m the general manager, and I thought I made it clear to you that we’re a team. If Latifa, say, has a problem and needs to leave the range then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to watch over her section while she’s gone. If I ever see you ignoring a problem because it’s not in your so-called section, I’ll deal with the result and you won’t like that deal.”

Lillith looked at the little concave burgers, at the staid runnels of grease scraped to the range’s corners, at the forearm-length spatula upside down beside three salt canisters. “Is the problem that the burgers are overcooked and should have been taken off sooner?”

“The problem,” Ron said, reaching across Lillith to grab a roll of paper towels, “is that this paper product was only a foot from the range, posing a fire hazard. It could have burned the restaurant down. Then how would you have felt about not taking responsibility for it?”

Ron motioned for Latifa, who’d been standing back during this interrogation, to return to the range, and walked away before Lillith could answer, leaving her alone with the feeling that she was a professional failure, and that she’d been cruelly bullied, and that she wasn’t observant enough, and that Ron was an idiot, and that she might lose her job, and that she hated her job and wanted to quit. But her feelings, she knew, were beside the point. This was about power and as in everything there were haves and have-nots.

Arriving home at the end of her shift, Lillith took off her colorful logoed baseball hat—one of the many things she hated about her job—crammed it into her bag, checked the mail, and unlocked the front door. Her one piece of mail was a flyer about an upcoming Wiccan festival in southern Oregon. Banana-grab and plop on the couch—ouch, who left a hairbrush here?—and TV-on and a few impromptu stomach crunches. It was important always to work on your abdominal muscles. She felt fat and the flesh folding over when she did a sit-up proved it. Maybe Sam had called. She rooted under the couch for the phone—where she preemptively hid it so that her little sister wouldn’t be able to hide it from her—and listened to the voice messages. Her mom’s gynecologist—dyke—and dad’s “squash buddy” and a weird high-pitched voice addressing itself to the head of the household and her ancient uncle Silas and that was it. No Sam. Fine. Maybe she didn’t like Sam as much as she thought she did. He was short. Dwarfish. She’d have to buy flat-heeled shoes to go out with him and put up with his Napoleon complex and probably never get to be on top. Why bother?